SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Local electronic music fans will be getting down at Shorty Brown later this month for the first Yellowknife Electronic Music Festival.

Chad Hinchey, a.k.a. Cynergii is putting together Yellowknife's first flagship electronic music festival at Shorty Brown Memorial Arena, July 27. The event will feature at least nine local artists. Hinchey is also involved with the Project X1A 2.0 event this Saturday night which will combine hip hop artists and electronic music artists together on one bill.

Chad Hinchey, or Cynergii, has been busy organizing the event, set to take place at the Shorty Brown Arena, July 27 from 4 to 11:30 p.m. At press time, the festival was scheduled to have nine DJ artists, one of which is coming from Vancouver. Others on the bill will include King Friday, Dustun, Pronoia and Soda Jerk.

"It looks like we are going to hit every genre," said Hinchey of the lineup. "Through the night, we have kind of set up the lineup and the time slots to make it sort of flow through the night and gets more intense as it grows. With the deejays we have and the music styles we have, it will be a nice flow through the whole night."

Hinchey's own introduction to DJing is an interesting one, starting about a year and a half ago while promoting an Edmonton-based event planning company called All Blown Up Inc.

Because the company puts together electronic musical events, he became involved after meeting Kyle Ritcey, the company's owner.

"At the time, I was starting to mess around on my computer and DJing not even with a system or a controller or anything," he said, adding he has been making his own music for about eight months as a result. "He helped me get a controller and a turntable and set up so that I could start DJing and, hopefully, be in one of their events."

Hinchey is still finalizing last minute decisions with the festival, including finding ways to sell food at the event since people will be there for eight hours. Liquor will be served on premises by a local fastball team, the Home Building Centre Diamondbacks. There are also plans to have an after party at the Top Knight.

Project X1A 2.0

In the meantime, Hinchey, through his company Cynergii Entertainment, is hosting a live act this Saturday night called Project X1A at the Top Knight, which will feature at least four acts - Higher Learning (Young Mic, Daps, Rohann and Tommy Bilfigger), Bipolar and Bouge, and DJ Chris Maclean, along with himself.

"Basically, it sparked last year and the idea was more about trying to combine the two genres just so people from the hip hop scene can see people from the electronic genre and the people from the electronic genre can see hip hop," he said. "So we wanted to push the two together so that we could bring the most people out to see the most things."

The event was successful enough that Hinchey wanted to hold it again this year. Doors open for the event at 9 p.m.